Sabana de la Mar

Sabana de la Mar sits on the southern shore of Samana Bay in Hato Mayor province, a fishing town of around 10,000 founded by Canary Island settlers in 1756. It has none of the resort infrastructure of the north coast: this working port, built on fishing and small-scale agriculture, functions mainly as the launch point for boat trips into Los Haitises National Park. Most visitors day-trip from Samana or Punta Cana, or make a deliberate detour to one of the country's least-commercialized protected areas.

Los Haitises, established in 1976, is a karst landscape of limestone hills, called mogotes, rising out of mangrove-lined water and riddled with caves that Taino and pre-Taino peoples decorated with pictographs long before Columbus arrived. Boats leave the town dock and reach the best-known caves, Cueva de la Linea and Cueva de la Arena, in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. Cueva de la Linea holds the largest collection of drawings, several hundred figures in charcoal and pigment; Cueva de la Arena is documented with 22 pictographs plus petroglyphs and bas-reliefs. The subjects range across marine creatures, birds, and human and ritual figures, all pre-Columbian, and both caves are developed for visitor access rather than scrambling.

The channels around the caves hold the greatest concentration of mangrove in the Caribbean and make Los Haitises one of the region's serious birding sites, with endemic species such as the Ridgway's hawk and the Hispaniolan parrot. It is also where the January to March whale season becomes visible from land: humpbacks gathering in Samana Bay to calve can sometimes be seen from shore, though most visitors pair the boat trip with a dedicated whale-watching excursion for closer sightings. Inland, the province holds Salto de la Jalda, at roughly 120 meters the tallest waterfall in the Caribbean.

Getting here takes planning. By road it is about 36 km from Hato Mayor del Rey, and the drive from Santo Domingo runs close to three hours, so check conditions first. The simpler route from Samana or Las Terrenas is the passenger ferry across the bay, about an hour each way and running several times daily. The nearest airport with scheduled service is Samana El Catey International, roughly 44 km away. Most people treat the town as a half-day excursion rather than a base, pairing it with the north coast's beaches or a longer loop through the eastern destinations in our itineraries. A waterfront restaurant and a plate of fresh fish close out the trip.